Below are a series of rebuttals of typical climate alarmists’ claims such as those made in the recently released Fourth National Climate Assessment Report. The authors of these rebuttals are all recognized experts in the relevant scientific fields. The rebuttals demonstrate the falsity of EPA’s claims merely by citing the most credible empirical data on the topic. For each alarmist claim, a summary of the relevant rebuttal is provided along with a link to the full text of the rebuttal which includes the names and the credentials of the authors of each rebuttal.

Claim: Heat Waves are increasing at an alarming rate and heat kills.
Summary of Rebuttal

There has been no detectable long-term increase in heat waves in the United States or elsewhere in the world. Most all-time record highs here in the U.S. happened many years ago, long before mankind was using much fossil fuel. Thirty-eight states set their all-time record highs before 1960 (23 in the 1930s!). Here in the United States, the number of 100F, 95F and 90F days per year has been steadily declining since the 1930s. The Environmental Protection Agency Heat Wave Index confirms the 1930s as the hottest decade. James Hansen while at NASA in 1999 said about the U.S. temperature record “In the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934”. When NASA was challenged on the declining heat records in the U.S, the reply was that the U.S. is just 2% of the world. However, all 8 continents recorded their all-time record highs before 1980. Interestingly while the media gives a great deal of coverage to even minor heat waves to support the case that man-made global warming is occurring, the media tends to ignore deadly cold waves. But in actual fact worldwide cold kills 20 times as many people as heat. This is documented in the “Excess Winter Mortality” which shows that the number of deaths in the 4 coldest winter months is much higher than the other 8 months of the year. The USA death rate in January and February is more than 1000 deaths per day greater than in it is July and August. Clearly, there is no problem with increased heat waves due to Climate Change.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_AC - Heat Waves

Claim: Global warming is causing more hurricanes and stronger hurricanes.
Summary of Rebuttal

There has been no detectable long-term trend in the number and intensity of hurricane activity globally. The activity does vary year to year and over multidecadal periods as ocean cycles including El Nino/La Nina, multidecadal cycles in the Pacific (PDO) and Atlantic (AMO) favor some basins over others. The trend in landfalling storms in the United States has been flat to down since the 1850s. Before the active hurricane season in the United States in 2017, there had been a lull of 4324 days (almost 12 years) in major hurricane landfalls, the longest lull since the 1860s.
Harvey was the first hurricane to make landfall in Texas since Ike in 2008 and the first Category 4 hurricane in Texas since Hurricane Carla in 1961. There has been a downtrend in Texas of both hurricanes and major hurricanes. Texas is an area where Gulf Tropical Storms and hurricanes often stall for days, and 6 of the heaviest tropical rainfall events for the U.S. have occurred in Texas. Harvey’s rains were comparable to many of these events. Claudette in 1979 had an unofficial rainfall total greater than in Harvey. In Florida, where Irma hit as a category 4 on the Keys, it came after a record 4339 days (just short of 12 years) without a landfalling hurricane. The previous record lull was in the 1860s (8 years). There has been no trend in hurricane intensity or landfalling frequency since at least 1900.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_AC - Hurricanes

Claim: Global warming is causing more and stronger tornadoes.
Summary of Rebuttal

Tornadoes are failing to follow “global warming” predictions. Big tornadoes have seen a decline in frequency since the 1950s. The years 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 all saw below average to near record low tornado counts in the U.S. since records began in 1954. 2017 rebounded only to the long-term mean. This lull followed a very active and deadly strong La Nina of 2010/11, which like the strong La Nina of 1973/74 produced record setting and very deadly outbreaks of tornadoes. Population growth and expansion outside urban areas have exposed more people to the tornadoes that once roamed through open fields. Tornado detection has improved with the addition of NEXRAD, the growth of the trained spotter networks, storm chasers armed with cellular data and imagery and the proliferation of cell phone cameras and social media. This shows up most in the weak EF0 tornado count but for storms from moderate EF1 to strong EF 3+ intensity, the trend has been flat to down despite improved detection.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_CA - Tornadoes

Claim: Global warming is increasing the magnitude and frequency of droughts and floods.
Summary of Rebuttal

Our use of fossil fuels to power our civilization is not causing droughts or floods. NOAA found there is no evidence that floods and droughts are increasing because of climate change. The number, extend or severity of these events does increase dramatically for a brief period of years at some locations from time to time but then conditions return to more normal. This is simply the long-established constant variation of weather resulting from a confluence of natural factors. In testimony before Congress Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. said: “It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century.” “The good news is U.S. flood damage is sharply down over 70 years,” Roger Pielke Jr. said. “Remember, disasters can happen any time....”. But it is also good to understand long-term trends based on data, not hype.”
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_AC - Droughts and Floods

Claim: Global Warming has increased U.S. Wildfires.
Summary of Rebuttal

Wildfires are in the news almost every late summer and fall. The National Interagency Fire Center has recorded the number of fires and acreage affected since 1985. This data show the number of fires trending down slightly, though the acreage burned had increased before leveling off over the last 20 years. The NWS tracks the number of days where conditions are conducive to wildfires when they issue red-flag warnings. It is little changed. 2017 was an active fire year in the U.S. but my no means a record. The U.S. had 64,610 fires, the 7th most since in 11 years and the most since 2012. The 9,574, 533 acres burned was the 4th most in 11 years and most since 2015. The fires burned in the Northwest including Montana with a very dry summer then the action shifted south seasonally with the seasonal start of the wind events like Diablo in northern California and Santa Ana to the south. Fires spread to northern California in October with an episode of the dry Diablo wind that blows from the east and then in December as strong and persistent Santa Ana winds and dry air triggered a round of large fires in Ventura County. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection the 2017 California wildfire season was the most destructive one on record with a total of 8,987 fires that burned 1,241,158 acres. It included five of the 20 most destructive wildland-urban interface fires in the state’s history. When it comes to considering the number of deaths and structures destroyed, the seven-fold increase in population in California from 1930 to 2017 must be noted. Not only does this increase in population mean more people and home structures in the path of fires, but it also means more fires. Lightning and campfires caused most historic fires; today most are the result of power lines igniting trees. The power lines have increased proportionately with the population, so it can be reasoned that most of the damage from wild fires in California is a result of increased population not Global Warming. The increased danger is also greatly aggravated by poor government forest management choices.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_AC - Wildfires

This is one claim that has been repeated for decades even as nature showed very much the opposite trend with unprecedented snows even to the big coastal cities. Every time they repeated the claim, it seems nature upped the ante more. Alarmists have eventually evolved to crediting warming with producing greater snowfall, because of increased moisture but the snow events in recent years have usually occurred in colder winters with high snow water equivalent ratios in frigid arctic air. Snowcover in the Northern Hemisphere, North America and Eurasia has been increasing since the 1960s in the fall and winter but declining in the spring. However, as NOAA advised might be the case, snowcover measurement methodology changes at the turn of this century may be responsible for part of the warm season differences.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_CA - Snow

Claim: Global warming is resulting in rising sea levels as seen in both tide gauge and satellite technology.
Summary of Rebuttal

This claim is demonstrably false. It really hinges on this statement: “Tide gauges and satellites agree with the model projections.” The models project a rapid acceleration of sea level rise over the next 30 to 70 years. However, while the models may project acceleration, the tide gauges clearly do not. All data from tide gauges in areas where land is not rising or sinking show instead a steady linear and unchanging sea level rate of rise from 4 up to 6 inches/century, with variations due to gravitational factors. It is true that where the land is sinking as it is in the Tidewater area of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta region, sea levels will appear to rise faster but no changes in CO2 production would change that. The implication that measured, validated, and verified Tide Gauge data support this conclusion remains simply false. All such references rely on “semi-empirical” information, which merges, concatenates, combines, and joins, actual tide gauge data with various models of the reference author’s choosing. Nowhere on this planet can a tide gauge be found, that shows even half of the claimed 3.3 mm Sea level rise rate in “Tectonically Inert” coastal zones. These are areas that lie between regions of geological uplift and subsidence. They are essentially neutral with respect to vertical land motion, and tide gauges located therein show between 1 mm/yr (3.9 inches/century) and 1.5 mm/yr (6 inches/century rise). The great Swedish Oceanographer, Nils-Axel Morner, has commented on this extensively, and his latest papers confirm this ‘inconvenient truth. Further, alarmist claims that “Satellites agree with the model projection” are false. Satellite technology was introduced to provide more objective measurement of the sea level rise because properly adjusted tide gauge data was not fitting Alarmists’ claims. However, the new satellite and radar altimeter data lacked the resolution to accurately measure sea levels down to the mm level. Moreover, the raw data from this technology also conflicted with Alarmists’ claims. As a result, adjustments to this data were also made - most notably a Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA). GIA assumes that basically all land is rebounding from long ago glaciations and oceanic basins are deepening. The assumption is that this rebounding is masking the true sea level rise. Alarmists continue to proclaim that their models project a rapid acceleration of sea level rise over the next 30 to 70 years, when those same models have failed to even come close to accurately measuring the past 25 years.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_CA - Sea Level

Claim: Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice loss is accelerating due to global warming.
Summary of Rebuttal

Satellite and surface temperature records and sea surface temperatures show that both the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are cooling, not warming and glacial ice is increasing, not melting. Satellite and surface temperature measurements of the southern polar area show no warming over the past 37 years. Growth of the Antarctic ice sheets means sea level rise is not being caused by melting of polar ice and, in fact, is slightly lowering the rate of rise. Satellite Antarctic temperature records show 0.02C/decade cooling since 1979. The Southern Ocean around Antarctica has been getting sharply colder since 2006. Antarctic sea ice is increasing, reaching all-time highs. Surface temperatures at 13 stations show the Antarctic Peninsula has been sharply cooling since 2000. The Arctic includes the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, and part of Siberia and northern Alaska. Because of the absence of any land mass in the Arctic Ocean, most of area lacks glaciers, which require a land mass. Thus, most of the Arctic contains only floating sea ice. Greenland, Iceland, northern Alaska, and northern Siberia contain the only glaciers in the general Arctic region. Arctic temperature records show that the 1920s and 1930s were warmer than 2000. Records of historic fluctuations of Arctic sea ice go back only to the first satellite images in 1979. That happens to coincide with the end of the 1945-1977 global cold period and the maximum extent of Arctic sea ice. During the warm period from 1978 until recently, the extent of sea ice has diminished, but increased in the past several years. The Greenland ice sheet has also grown recently.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_AC - Arctic, Antarctic, Greenland 123117

As the airs CO2 content rises in response to ever-increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions, more and more carbon dioxide is expected to dissolve into the surface waters of the world’s oceans, which dissolution is projected to cause a 0.3 to 0.7 pH unit decline in the planet’s oceanic waters by the year 2300. A potential pH reduction of this magnitude has provoked concern and led to predictions that, if it occurs, marine life will be severely harmed - with some species potentially driven to extinction - as they experience negative impacts in growth, development, fertility and survival. This ocean acidification hypothesis, as it has come to be known, has gained great momentum in recent years, because it offers a second independent reason to regulate fossil fuel emissions in addition to that provided by concerns over traditional global warming. For even if the models are proven to be wrong with respect to their predictions of atmospheric warming, extreme weather, glacial melt, sea level rise, or any other attendant catastrophe, those who seek to regulate and reduce CO2 emissions have a fall-back position, claiming that no matter what happens to the climate, the nations of the Earth must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions because of projected direct negative impacts on marine organisms via ocean acidification.The ocean chemistry aspect of the ocean acidification hypothesis is rather straightforward, but it is not as solid as it is often claimed to be. For one thing, the work of a number of respected scientists suggests that the drop in oceanic pH will not be nearly as great as the IPCC and others predict. And, as with all phenomena involving living organisms, the introduction of life into the analysis greatly complicates things. When a number of interrelated biological phenomena are considered, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to draw such sweeping negative conclusions about the reaction of marine organisms to ocean acidification. Quite to the contrary, when life is considered, ocean acidification is often found to be a non-problem, or even a benefit. And in this regard, numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the robustness of multiple marine plant and animal species to ocean acidification - when they are properly performed under realistic experimental conditions.
Detailed Rebuttal and Author: EF_RRT_CA - Ocean pH

Claim: Carbon pollution is a health hazard.
Summary of Rebuttal

The term “carbon pollution” is a deliberate, ambiguous, disingenuous term, designed to mislead people into thinking carbon dioxide is pollution. It is used by the environmentalists to confuse the environmental impacts of CO2 emissions with the impact of the emissions of unwanted waste products of combustion. The burning of carbon-based fuels (fossil fuels - coal, oil, natural gas - and biofuels and biomass) converts the carbon in the fuels to carbon dioxide (CO2), which is an odorless invisible gas that is plant food and it is essential to life on the planet. Because the burning of the fuel is never 100% efficient, trace amounts of pollutants including unburnt carbon are produced in the form of fine particulates (soot), hydrocarbon gases and carbon monoxide. In addition, trace amounts of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides and other pollutant constituents can be produced. In the US, all mobile and industrial stationary combustion sources must have emission control systems that remove the particulates and gaseous pollutants so that the emissions are in compliance with EPA’s emission standards. The ambient air pollutant concentrations have been decreasing for decades and are going to keep decreasing for the foreseeable future because of existing non-GHG-related regulations.
Detailed Rebuttal and Authors: EF_RRT_AC - Health

Conclusion
The well-documented invalidation of the “three lines of evidence” upon which EPA attributes global warming to human-caused CO2 emissions breaks the causal link between such emissions and global warming. {See here and here).

This in turn necessarily breaks the causal chain between CO2 emissions and the alleged knock-on effects of global warming, such as loss of Arctic ice, increased sea level, and increased heat waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. These alleged downstream effects are constantly cited to whip up alarm and create demands for ever tighter CO2 regulation. EPA explicitly relied on predicted increases in such events to justify the Endangerment Finding. But as shown above, there is no evidence to support such claims, and copious empirical evidence that refutes them. The enormous cost and essentially limitless scope of the government’s regulatory authority over GHG/CO2 emissions cannot lawfully rest upon a collection of scary stories that are conclusively disproven by readily available empirical data.The legal criteria for reconsidering the Endangerment Finding are clearly present in this case. The scientific foundation of the Endangerment Finding has been invalidated. The parade of horrible calamities that the Endangerment Finding predicts and that a vast program of regulation seeks to prevent have been comprehensively and conclusively refuted by empirical data. The Petition for Reconsideration should be granted.

On January 4 NTZ weekly contributor Kenneth Richard published a list of 485 papers dumping cold water on climate alarmism in 2017.

Looking through the list I find published papers showing that snowfall frequency has in fact increased over the the past 60 years!

Blizzard activity jumps fourfold

For example a paper by Coleman and Schwartz, 2017 revealed 713 blizzards over the 55 years with 57 federal disaster declarations resulting. Of these 57 declared disasters, more than a half have occurred since the year 2000.

The published scientific study also founds that “seasonal blizzard frequencies displayed a distinct upward trend, with a more substantial rise over the past two decades”.

It adds that the modeled increase in blizzard activity showed a “nearly fourfold upsurge between the start and end of the study period at 5.9 and 21.6 blizzards, respectively”. If the trend continues, then we would need to expect even more such blizzards.

In a another publication, Changnon, 2017 evaluated heavy 30-day snowfall amounts east of the Rockies in the United States during the period 1900-2016. The comprehensive data assessment identified 507 stations in this long-term climate study.

The author examined the top 30-day heavy snowfall amount and the average of the top five 30-day heavy snowfall amounts. The findings also surprised global warming scientists who warned earlier that snowfall would become less frequent as the globe warmed. The publications abstract reads:

The northern Great Plains, Great Lakes, Midwest, and Northeast experienced more top five periods [more snow] in the second half of the 117-year period [1958-2016], where most of the southern states experienced top five periods throughout the study period.”

Finally a study conducted by Hatchett et al., 2017 found a “winter snow level rise in the northern Sierra Nevada from 2008 to 2017”. Sea surface temperatures offshore California were observed to be related to snow cover.

I’d like a reference of who exactly was surprised by this. Is that available? A cold location would of course receive more snow with increasing humidity despite increasing temperatures. That seems to be pretty straight forward, doesn’t it? A location that barely reaches temperatures low enough for snow (let’s say, has only a few days of snow per year), would stop experiencing snow with increasing temperatures. That seems pretty straight forward too. So who was surprised?

Kunkel et al., 2002: “Surface conditions favorable for heavy lake-effect snow decreased in frequency by 50% and 90% for the HadCM2 and CGCM1 [models], respectively, by the late 21st Century. This reduction [according to models] was due almost entirely to… an increase in average winter air temperatures.”

IPCC AR4 (2007): “Snow season length and snow depth are very likely to decrease in most of North America”

Kapnick and Delworth, 2013: “In response to idealized radiative forcing changes, both models produce similar global-scale responses in which global-mean temperature and total precipitation increase while snowfall decreases… By using a simple multivariate model, temperature is shown to drive these trends by decreasing snowfall almost everywhere” (press release) “In North America, the greatest reductions in snowfall will occur along the northeast coast, in the mountainous west, and in the Pacific Northwest. Coastal regions from Virginia to Maine…

Mr. Morner, you have recently visited the Fiji islands in South Pacific several times in order to research changes on the coasts and sea levels. Why Fiji?

Nils-Axel Morner: I knew there would be a science conference in New York in June 2017 that focused on sea level changes in Fiji. In addition, it was known that the island nation would chair the 23rd World Climate Conference, which took place last November in Bonn. Thus, Fiji moved into the focus of interest. It was said that the rising sea level had done a lot of damage there. I wanted to check with my own eyes if that is true.

What made you skeptical?

I have been researching sea-level changes my entire life, traveling to 59 countries. Hardly any other researcher has so much experience in this field. However, the IPCC has always misrepresented the facts on this topic. It exaggerates the risks of a sea level rise enormously. The IPCC relies in particular on questionable computer models rather than field research. However, I always want to know what is going on. That is why I went to Fiji.

However, according to ProClim, the Swiss climate research platform, there are a series of measurements in Fiji that show a sharp rise in sea level in recent decades. Specifically, the sea level has increased by 5.4 millimeters annually since 1990, which is twice as much as the global average.

Yes, I know these measurements. These are two series of tide heights, that is, water levels at low tide and high tide. We checked these data with the result that they are of very poor quality. One series has been influenced by the fact that port facilities were built on loose sediment soil near the measuring station, which could have changed tidal heights. For the other series, the measuring station was even moved. The researchers who rely on such data are office workers. They are not specialized in coastal dynamics processes and sea level changes. Many of them have no idea of ​​the real conditions.

How did you go about getting better data?

On the one hand, we have been following the given examples, where sea level rise is said to have led to coastal erosion. The result was that erosion has been caused by human intervention - such as new coastal structures altering water currents or increased harvests of sea cucumbers, which could have destabilized the seabed. To prove sea level changes over the past 500 years, we have dated sand deposits to see when they came into being. In addition, we have researched the spread of coral in recent centuries. Typically, coral reefs grow in height when sea levels rise and in width when they remain constant. If the level drops, corals die off. Corals do not lie; they are a reliable indicator - much more reliable than tidal measurements.

What was the result?

We were able to prove that the sea level in Fiji from 1550 to about 1700 was about seventy centimeters higher than it is today. Then it sank and was about fifty centimeters lower in the 18th century than it is today. Then it rose to about the current level. In the last 200 years, the level has not changed significantly. For the past 50 to 70 years, it has been stable.

Were you surprised?

Not really. It was not the first time that the claims of the IPCC turned out to be wrong.

Fiji is only a single archipelago. Maybe the situation is different in other places.

There are also data from many other places in the world. These by no means confirm the picture that the IPCC draws. In some places, the sea level is indeed rising, but in other places, it is stable, and elsewhere it is even dropping. For example, sea levels are constant in the Indian Ocean and on the Atlantic coast of South America. On South Pacific islands such as Tuvalu and Kiribati measurements do not confirm the constant warnings about the sinking of these archipelagos. The sea certainly erodes the shores here and there, but islands grow elsewhere as well. It has always been like this.

Why do many climate researchers warn then about sinking islands?

Because they have a political agenda. They are biased towards the interpretation that man is causing climate change, and that it is a threat. The IPCC was founded with the purpose of prove man-made climate change and to warn against it. His goal was thus fixed from the beginning. It sticks to it like a dogma - no matter what the facts are. As a specialist in sea level developments, I have consistently found in recent years that the IPCC team does not include a single expert on this issue.

Is there no problem with the rise of the sea level at all?

No.

No danger that islands could sink?

The doomsday scenarios usually refer to the year 2100. I estimate that the sea level will then rise by five centimeters on average, with an uncertainty of 15 centimeters. The change might go from plus 20 centimeters to minus 10 centimeters. This is not a threat. Anyone who claims that there will be a threat of an increase of one meter or so has no idea of ​​physics.

However, a lot of meltwater from glaciers and ice shields flows into the sea.

Much less than you think. In Antarctica, no ice melts in total. When ice melts in the Arctic, it does not change the sea level - because floating ice does not affect the water level when melting according to the laws of physics. In essence, only melting ice on Greenland contributes to a level increase. However, this amount is small.

Seawater heats up and expands, increasing sea level.

That is true, but only by a few centimeters, not by decimeters or even meters. There are much more important influences, which affect the sea level, especially solar activity. There are also significant horizontal water shifts, from one ocean to another. Like the data in Fiji, those of the Maldives also show that levels were clearly higher in the 17th century than they are today. Significantly, this was the time when it was cold on the northern hemisphere; this period is called the Little Ice Age. At that time solar activity was lower than today. It was the big solar minimum. It seems that low solar activity is associated with high sea levels in the tropics - and vice versa. The sea levels seem to depend mainly on the oscillation of solar cycles and hardly on melting ice.

You are among the most distinguished critics of the IPCC. Why have you distanced yourself from the warnings of manmade climate change?

In 1991, I gave a scientific presentation at a conference on sea level changes in the U.S. The representative of the IPCC present there responded with great anger to my point of view. This reaction surprised me. Because in science circles, it is usual that you listen to each other and debate about different points of view. Later, I noticed more and more that the IPCC was disseminating false information and adhered to obvious mistakes. I then published a paper on the influence of the sun on the sea level, which was supported by 19 recognized experts. However, the IPCC attacked the paper with outrageous claims and caused the scientific journal, in which it was published, to be discontinued.

So do they want to stop you?

They cannot stop me. I have published about 650 scientific papers to date. However, young colleagues, who think critically, have no chance given these kind of manipulations. In principle, most editors of science magazines no longer accept papers that are contrary to the IPCC’s claims, regardless of the quality of the papers.

However, 97 percent of climate researchers are convinced that global warming is man-made?

This is nonsense. This number is based on dubious polls. In fact, the majority of researchers reject the claims made by the IPCC, depending on the field between 50 and 80 percent. Only meteorologists agree almost 100 percent with the IPCC. However, these people are financially dependent on the IPCC.

However, doesn’t it make sense to reduce the CO2 in principle?

Why? It is obvious that CO2 is not the main driver of temperatures. It is noteworthy that the IPCC itself has repeatedly reduced the warming trend in recent years. If a temperature increase of only 1.5 degrees Celsius is to be expected, that is not important.

Why do we hear so many warnings about climate change then?

Some people have exposed themselves heavily with their claims and obviously cannot go back now. In addition, public research money flows almost exclusively to climate alarmists. We are dealing here with a quasi-religious movement that claims to protect the environment. The fight against global warming is now set against the fight to alleviate poverty.

Which would be the right priorities?

It would be important to protect people from natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. In addition, 25,000 people die every day because they have no access to clean drinking water. The food supply is often just as catastrophic. However, Nigeria, for example, is discouraged from using coal and thus from advancing economic development and prosperity that would reduce hunger and poverty. There are today efficient technologies to filter out air pollutants in coal use. Effectively, the fight against climate change harms people very much.

What will happen next?

Solar activity is expected to decrease over the next few decades and there will be cooling as a result. By then it will probably become clear how wrong the warnings of global warming are.

Since the beginning of recorded history there have been end of the world predictions. In recent years we have had radio preachers, politicians and scientists declare with certainty that the world would soon end, either because of our decadent lifestyle, or because of “global warming,” now known as “climate change.”

Responses to these Chicken Little declarations have ranged from people hiding in caves to the most recent announcement by Costco that it has a doomsday meal kit for sale. The cost is $6,000. The online listing says the kit contains 36,000 servings of food that will feed a family of four for one year.

Marc Morano’s new book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change” (Regnery Publishing) is just in time to refute the argument that “climate change” will destroy all life on Earth. It is a mark of Morano’s dark humor that he features as an “endorsement” of the book a comment by the liberal Daily Kos, which calls Morano “evil personified.”

The book is a point-by-point takedown of the predictions of disaster made by the climate change movement, none of which have materialized, but when one is part of a cult, facts don’t matter.

In the book’s foreword, the late John Coleman, who was a meteorologist, TV weatherman and co-founder of The Weather Channel, writes: “We meteorologists are well aware of how limited our ability is to predict the weather. Our predictions become dramatically less reliable as they extend into the future. When we try to predict just a few weeks into the future our predictions become increasingly inaccurate. Yet the ‘climate change’ establishment that now dominates the UN bureaucracy and our own government science establishment claim that they can predict the temperature of the Earth decades into the future.”

Coleman then gets to the heart of the issue: ‘Their global warming scare is not driven by science; it is now being driven by politics. So today anybody who defies the prevailing ‘climate change’ scare puts his career and his reputation into extreme danger.”

Among the facts revealed in Morano’s book are these: The world spends $1 billion a day to “prevent” global warming; A UN scientist says the “97 percent consensus” on global warming was “pulled from thin air,” presumably hot air from many politicians; scientific organizations claim climate change ‘consensus,’ but have not polled their members; climate policies are not helping, but “crushing the world’s poor”; The Paris climate accord theoretically postpones global warming by just four years, but will cost $100 trillion if fully implemented; climate change has been blamed for prostitution, barroom brawls, airplane turbulence and war; one climate activist is quoted as saying we should “protect our kids by not having them”; recent “hottest year” claims are based on statistically meaningless year-to-year differences; Antarctica is actually gaining, not losing ice; carbon dioxide levels today are 10 times lower than in some past Ice Ages.

Morano argues that the debate over climate change is not settled, as many claim. Science is never settled and apparently neither is the politics of climate change, which is being advanced by people who want more control over every aspect of our lives.

Real scientists who specialize in climate and related fields are quoted in the book. These are voices we rarely, if ever, see mentioned in the mainstream media because the media are part of the collusion.

Read this book and you will become an informed climate change denier, armed with arguments and facts to counter the propaganda being pushed by climate change fanatics. It will also save you $6,000 the next time you visit Costco.

This winter featured snow in North Africa where alarmists predicted warmth and expanding drought and desert. Instead colder temperatures and increasing precipitation and shrinking desert has been observed.

By JAMES DELINGPOLE 20 Feb 2018

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data. This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history.

If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees.

Here is NOAA’s January 2018 chart for Northeast U.S. - an area which includes New England along with NY, PA, NJ, DE and MD.

You’d never guess from it that those regions had just experienced record-breaking cold, would you?

That’s because, as Paul Homewood has discovered, NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again - presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology - NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.

We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

Homewood first smelt a rat when he examined the New York data sets.

He was particularly puzzled at NOAA’s treatment of the especially cold winter that ravaged New York in 2013/14, which he describes here:

The cold weather really began on Jan 2nd, when an Arctic front descended across much of the country, and extended well into March.

The NWS wrote at the end of the winter:

The winter of 2013-14 finished as one of the coldest winters in recent memory for New York State. Snowfall across Western and North Central New York was above normal for many areas, and in some locations well above normal. This winter comes on the heels of two previous mild winters, making the cold and snow this winter feel that much harsher.

Temperatures this winter finished below normal every month, and the January through March timeframe finished at least 4 degrees below normal for the two primary climate stations of Western New York (Buffalo and Rochester)…

Relentless cold continued through the month of January across the region.

So why, he wondered, did NOAA have this marked down as only the 30th coldest winter (since 1895) on its New York State charts, with a mean temperature of 16.9F?

Homewood compared the local records for January 1943 and January 2014 - months which, according to NOAA’s charts, had very similar average temperatures.

What he found was that NOAA’s charts were deeply inaccurate. The 2014 local temperatures had been adjusted upwards by NOAA and the 1943 local temperatures downwards.

Now, Homewood has given the same treatment to the most recent Big Freeze - the winter of 2017/2018.

Yet again, he has found that NOAA’s arbitrary adjustments tell a lie. They claim that January 2018 was warmer in the New York region than January 1943, when the raw data from local stations tells us this just isn’t true.

So at the three sites of Ithaca, Auburn and Geneva, we find that January 2018 was colder than January 1943 by 1.0, 1.7 and 1.3F respectively.

Yet NOAA say that the division was 2.1F warmer last month. NOAA’s figure makes last month at least 3.1F warmer in comparison with 1943 than the actual station data warrants.

He concludes:

Clearly NOAA’s highly homogenized and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data.

And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the US is any better?

Well indeed. The key point here is that while NOAA frequently makes these adjustments to the raw data, it has never offered a convincing explanation as to why they are necessary. Nor yet, how exactly their adjusted data provides a more accurate version of the truth than the original data.

One excuse NOAA’s apologists make is that weather stations are subject to changing environmental conditions. For example, when the station sited at Syracuse in 1929 was located at what was originally just a sparse aerodrome. Since then, however, as Homewood notes, it has grown into a large international airport with two runways servicing two million passengers a year. Its weather station readings therefore will certainly have been corrupted by the Urban Heat Island effect: that is, its temperature readings will have been artificially elevated by the warmth from the surrounding development and aircraft engines.

So you’d think, wouldn’t you, that to compensate for this NOAA would adjust the recent temperatures downwards. Instead, for no obvious reasons, it has adjusted them upwards.

This is a scandal. NOAA’s climate gatekeepers are political activists not honest scientists and the U.S. taxpayer has no business funding their propaganda.

Drain the swamp!

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Recall the story we posted a few years ago about NOAA shenanigans in Maine. The original USHCN data set was downloaded in 2011 for a presentation. It showed no statistically significant trend (slightly negative) since 1895.

When President Trump calls the alarm surrounding climate change a hoax, he is fundamentally correct: there is no valid scientific basis for climate alarm. Climate alarmism is made possible by equal parts data manipulation and worthless climate models.

Now that Congress and the president are done with tax reform, many expect spending cuts and debt reduction to be up next. Given the huge and still increasing economic costs being imposed on the nation for no scientifically valid reason, we suggest a renewed focus on rapidly eliminating destructive carbon dioxide emission regulations.

For those not familiar, in December 2009 the Obama administration issued a report (the EF) that claimed to find atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG) pose a “danger” to human health and welfare.

Despite President Trump’s statement that climate alarm is a “hoax,” nearly everyone Pruitt talks to - holdover officials at EPA, legions of academics receiving government funding, lobbying organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, and even many energy industry executives - tells him that reconsidering the EF is a huge mistake because the scientific evidence supporting it is overwhelming.

Pruitt has proposed a year long, perhaps televised, Red/Blue debate to clarify the scientific situation. But before this lengthy process has even started, environmental groups and blue state AGs are already pummeling EPA in court with its own EF, winning victories that obstruct the administration’s efforts to grow America’s energy sector, and to enhance its economic and national security.

So, what is the actual science behind the EF? We confidently assert that in any Red/Blue evaluation of the science, where the Blue team supports the EF, the Blue team will lose badly.

“Warmists” claim a 97% scientific consensus regarding the hypothesized catastrophic impact of increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other GHGs. But this illusion of consensus has only come about through misrepresentation of global temperatures and research results plus rigid enforcement of orthodoxy and refusal to debate for some two decades.

In accordance with the scientific method, the EF has been shown to be invalid at least three separate times over the past two years. One of us (Wallace) is the lead author of three scientific research reports that, each in a unique fashion, invalidated all of the lines of evidence on which EPA claimed to rely for its EF.

All three of these reports meet two criteria fundamental to the scientific method: (1) the authors’ mathematical/statistical modeling work can be easily replicated since the model results are shown, and all of the data utilized are stated in the research reports to be available from one of the authors; and (2) extensive peer review, with the distinguished, highly credentialed reviewers being publicly identified.

By contrast, the vast majority of the work on which EPA relied for the EF does not meet these two criteria, and therefore would be excluded from consideration in a scientifically proper reconsideration. Most important, our findings have never been invalidated by the massive climate alarm community.

As an illustration of the relevance of these findings, our June 2017 Research Report sought to validate the estimates of current and historical global average surface temperature (GAST) from NOAA, NASA, and the UK’s Hadley CRU, using the best available empirical data.

These official GAST estimates are a necessary foundation for EPA’s “lines of evidence” for its EF and are also the foundation for frequent government claims of record-setting temperatures. But this research found it impossible to conclude from the three GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever. Instead, the conclusive findings were that the GAST data sets are simply not a valid representation of reality.

More specifically, in this research report, past changes in the previously officially reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.

And, it was nearly always accomplished by each entity systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

Given the magnitude of each of the three entities’ historical data adjustments, and their removal of the previous officially-reported cyclical temperature patterns, the officially-reported data are now totally inconsistent with very considerable current, published and credible U.S and other temperature data.

With GAST data set validity being a necessary condition for the EF, it too is invalidated by these research findings. Therefore, EPA’s 2009 claim that CO2 is a pollutant has been decisively invalidated. The same conclusion is reached based on separate analyses in the other two research reports. Thus, the likelihood of this EF invalidation result being in error is nil.​

For there to be a real global warming crisis, it is necessary that rising atmospheric GHG concentrations be proven to have a statistically significant impact on GAST. Collateral claims of danger from things like extreme weather events, droughts, floods, hurricanes and rising seas are fundamentally based on proof of that impact. But that proof has not been made.

The regulations based on the EF that President Obama imposed (e.g., the Clean Power Plan) cause huge and totally unnecessary costs to the economy in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Given the vast economic costs to America of pursuing the suppression of fossil fuels, it makes no sense to insert a further one-year plus Red/Blue debate delay in granting reconsideration of the EF. Instead, the Red/Blue exercise should be held as a prompt, on-the-record legal reconsideration of the EF.

When this exercise is over, the American people finally will have been shown the truth about the shoddy, tendentious, and unscientific mangling of data that’s necessary to sustain the cult of climate alarm.

Wallace, Ph.D., is the lead author of numerous papers and legal briefs regarding EPA’s Endangerment Finding.

Menton is a lawyer who has submitted a petition calling on EPA to reopen its Endangerment Finding.

Electricity Consumers File New Study in Their Call for EPA to Reopen its Endangerment Finding

Generally speaking, the scientific community has been highly politicized and young people are being indoctrinated by way of their schooling at all levels. Bad science is now the rule in our universities and professional societies - see the latest special edition by Jeff Rosenfeld, long the editor and gatekeeper of BAMS which includes easily refuted ‘junk science’. Climate Alarmists, with the all too willing help from the mainstream media, play ambulance chasers making wild claims that every weather event of significance is the result of our human use of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, our teams have shown that we can explain all the changes in global temperatures with natural factors, and that we can equally use the natural factors to successfully forecast upcoming seasons - something which the dynamical CO2-driven models have shown they are incapable of reliably doing.

How bad is this situation? The abomination called the NCA report, led by UCS environmental ‘scientist’ lightweights, even claims it is now possible to find human attribution without detection. In other words, even when nothing really unusual seems to be happening, human influence is there! Like Senator Stabenow of Michigan who says she senses global warming and climate change every time she flies - in an airplane we hope!

Unfortunately, climate alarmism is embedded in the deep state mentality. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Republican from Indiana in written testimony very recently warned of the potential for “abrupt climate change,” Coats’ testimony said the past 115 years have been the warmest period in the history of modern civilization. He also asserted, based on intelligence information, that climatic changes could result in far-reaching global disruption. Not to be outgunned, a new report by the allegedly non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) addressing “evolving assessments” of human’s contribution to climate change concludes that there now is high confidence that human influence is the dominant cause, issuing a rebuke to climate skeptics in Congress and in the Trump administration.

The reason so many of the scientists who have worked for years in their specialty areas to understand how and why weather and climate cycles happen are so concerned about this climate alarmism is because we can explain using rigorous scientific methods all of the changes in temperature and weather w/o GHGs. We see data being manipulated to fit theory instead of applying the scientific method and rethinking theory when data shows it is wrong

That is why the group of specialists cited in the Press Release below was formed and all of the time and effort provided PRO BONO by scientists and lawyers. Our work demonstrates that President Trump’s initial instincts were correct. This has been a cruel hoax. However, as Paul Driessen writes here “With trillions of dollars in research money, power, prestige, renewable energy subsidies, wealth redistribution schemes, and dreams of international governance on the line, the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex is not taking the situation lightly. Climate fear-mongering is in full swing.” Notwithstanding this effort, our specialist teams’ work continues to show with real data that climate change is neither catastrophic or man-made.

1. Just Released, new research findings demonstrate that Ten Frequent Climate Alarmists’ Claims have each been Rebutted by true experts in each Field by simply citing the most relevant and credible empirical data.

2. The new results invalidate 10 very frequent Alarmist Claims in recent years, and thereby also invalidate the so-called “lines of evidence” on which EPA claimed to base its 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding.

3. If the Endangerment Finding is not vacated, whether the current administration likes it or not, it is certain that electric utility, automotive and many other industries will face ongoing EPA CO2 regulation.

4. This scientifically illiterate basis for regulation will raise U.S. energy prices thereby reducing economic growth, jobs and national security.

February 20, 2018

On February 9, 2018, The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC) submitted a fifth Supplement to their Petition to provide additional new highly relevant and credible information. (See: EF CPP Fifth Supplement to Petition for Recon FINAL020918 ) It relates to variables other than temperature describing the Earth’s Climate System. With each of EPA’s three Lines of Evidence purporting to support their 2009 Endangerment Finding already shown in the CHECC petition and its first 2 Supplements to be invalid, EPA has no proof whatsoever that CO2 has had a statistically significant impact on global temperatures.

The Council’s original Petition (here and First Supplement to Petition (here ) demonstrated that the Endangerment Finding is nothing more than assumptions that have each been disproved by the most relevant empirical evidence from the real world. The original Petition was substantially based on a major peer-reviewed 2016 scientific paper by James Wallace, John Christy and Joseph D’Aleo (Wallace 2016) that analyzed the best available temperature data sets and “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important tropical and global temperature time series data sets analyzed.” The full text of Wallace 2016 may be found here .

First Supplement to Petition was substantially based on a new April 2017 peer reviewed scientific paper, also from the same authors (Wallace 2017A). Wallace 2017A can be found here Wallace 2017A concluded that once impacts of natural factors such as solar, volcanic and ENSO activity are accounted for, there is no “natural factor adjusted” warming remaining to be attributed to rising atmospheric CO2 levels.

The Second Supplement to the Petition relied on a third new major peer reviewed scientific paper from James Wallace, Joseph D’Aleo and Craig Idso, published in June 2017 (Wallace 2017B). Wallace 2017B analyzes the GAST data issued by U.S. agencies NASA and NOAA, as well as British group Hadley CRU. (Wallace 2017B can be found here. In this research report past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, this result was nearly always accomplished by each entity systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

The Second Supplement to Petition states: Adjustments that impart an ever-steeper upward trend in the data by removing the natural cyclical temperature patterns present in the data deprive the GAST products from NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU of the credibility required for policymaking or climate modeling, particularly when they are relied on to drive trillions of dollars in expenditures.

The invalidation of the adjusted GAST data knocked yet another essential pillar out from under the lines of evidence that are the claimed foundation of the Endangerment Finding. As the Second Supplement to Petition stated: It is therefore inescapable that if the official GAST data from NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU are invalid, then both the “basic physical understanding” of climate and the climate models will also be invalid.

The scientific invalidity of the Endangerment Finding becomes more blindingly obvious and undeniable with each day’s accumulation of reliable empirical data and, the willingness of more scientists to come forward with such new evidence (here. Perhaps recognizing this fact, Climate Alarmists have over time gone from focusing on Global Warming, to Climate Change to simply fear of Carbon. Thus, this research sought to determine the credibility of Ten (10) very frequently cited Climate Alarmists Claims.

Below are Rebuttals to each of these ten typical climate alarmists’ claims. The rebuttal authors are all recognized experts on their topic and each rebuttal demonstrates the claim fallacy by merely citing the most credible empirical data. For a in depth summary of the alarmist claim rebuttal and linkage to the full reports see here.

The invalidation of the three lines of evidence upon which EPA attributes global warming to human GHG emissions breaks the causal link between human GHG emissions and global warming. This in turn necessarily breaks the causal chain between human GHG emissions and the alleged knock-on effects of global warming, such as loss of Arctic ice, increased sea level, and increased heat waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.

Nevertheless, these alleged downstream effects are constantly cited to whip up alarm and create demands for ever tighter regulation of GHG emissions involving all fossil fuels, not just coal. EPA explicitly relied on predicted increases in such events to justify the Endangerment Finding. But there is no evidence to support such Alarmist Claims, and copious empirical evidence that refutes them. The enormous cost and essentially limitless scope of the government’s regulatory authority over GHG emissions cannot lawfully rest upon a collection of scary stories that are conclusively disproven by readily available empirical data.

The scientific invalidity of the Endangerment Finding becomes more blindingly obvious and undeniable with each day’s accumulation of reliable empirical data. It is time for an honest and rigorous scientific re-evaluation of the 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding. The nation has been taken down a tragically foolish path of pointless GHG/CO2 regulations and wasteful mal-investments to “solve” a problem which does not actually exist. Our leaders must summon the courage to acknowledge the truth and act accordingly.

The legal criteria for reconsidering the Endangerment Finding are clearly present in this case. The scientific foundation of the Endangerment Finding has been invalidated. The parade of horrible calamities that the Endangerment Finding predicts and that a vast program of regulation seeks to prevent have been comprehensively and conclusively refuted by empirical data. The Petition for Reconsideration should be granted.

The Council brought its Petition because the Obama-era greenhouse gas regulations threaten, as President Obama himself conceded, to make the price of electricity “skyrocket.” But clearly CO2 regulation does not just raise electricity prices, it raises all fossil fuel prices. America can have, and must have, the lowest possible energy costs in order to attain and maintain its energy, economic and national security.

Regular readers here will know that one of the things I do in my semi-retirement is represent a group of scientists who are appalled by what masquerades under the name of “science” in popular discourse about climate change. Our effort in various venues is to educate as to the ways in which the so-called “scientific consensus” of impending catastrophic global warming is not scientific at all, and is the opposite of science.

It’s not just that “consensus” is irrelevant to real science, and can frequently be overturned. It’s that there’s an entire suite of criteria by which the promotion of climate hysteria departs from science and the scientific method: For example, where is the falsifiable hypothesis? What is the null hypothesis? What are that data that, if they emerged, would be conceded to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis? In lieu of a hypothesis that can be falsified, we find frequent assertions that literally everything—including facts that are the direct opposite of each other—constitutes proof that global warming “is occurring” and will inevitably have catastrophic effects. One day there is a claim that snow will be a thing of the past (it’s getting warmer!) and the next day a big snow storm is claimed as evidence of the damaging effects of global warming (we told you to expect more extreme weather!). One day a drought is claimed as evidence of catastrophic effects of global warming, and the next day it’s a flood being claimed as evidence of the same. Meanwhile, has there been any actual verification of a falsifiable hypothesis—and is it a verification that can be replicated by others? And, why are critical data being cherry-picked and/or altered to support the “consensus”?

We all learned the fundamentals of the scientific method back in high school, or even junior high school. Isn’t it obvious to everyone that the antics of climate change alarm promoters are unscientific and anti-scientific?

Unfortunately, as I frequently point out to my colleagues, on important political issues, very few human minds can be changed by mere reason and logic, no matter how ironclad that reason and logic may be. We may think we are creatures of reason, but that’s only a veneer. The famous quote is attributed to Jonathan Swift:

“Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.”

On the other hand, there are things that can persuade even those who are very difficult to persuade. Consider, for example, how your views of intermittent “renewable” energy sources as a remedy for climate change might be affected by a tripling—or maybe a quintupling—of your electricity bill. Then throw in a few power blackouts for good measure. And finally, let the information seep through that emissions aren’t even going down! Which brings us back to the case of Germany.

As I noted in this post back in November, as recently as 2015 there was no political party of any significance anywhere in Europe that stood against climate change hysteria and against the huge increases in wind and solar power generation claimed necessary to save us from climate disaster. Work by Norwegian political scientist Sondre Batstrand, summarized here in the Guardian in October 2015, had concluded that “the US Republican Party stands alone in its rejection of the need to tackle climate change and efforts to become the party of climate supervillains.” In Germany, as recently as last year, no political party representing a dissenting position on any aspect of the climate “consensus” held a single seat in the Bundestag. But Germany’s Energiewende ("energy transition"), instituted in 2010, had caused Germany’s consumer electricity prices to skyrocket since the prior national elections in 2013.

Then, in the September 2017 elections, two parties thought to represent climate skepticism at least to some degree—the FDP (Free Democrats) and AfD (Alliance for Germany)—suddenly won some 24.6% of the seats in the Bundestag. OK, but exactly how serious are these people in their climate skepticism? We learn about that from an excellent post today at the site NoTricksZone, titled “Green energy opposition becoming formidable force in Germany.”

It appears that over the past couple of weeks, two young members of the Bundestag, one from the FDP and the other from AfD, made their first speeches in the parliament, and chose the subject of climate. Videos of their speeches are included at the link, but I won’t embed them here, because they are in German and I assume that few readers could understand them. However, Pierre Gosselin of NTZ clearly understands the language, and provides translations and paraphrases of some extended excerpts.

From Sandra Weeser of FDP:

In her speech Weeser points out that despite the rapidly growing green energy capacity being installed, the effort to reduce CO2 has failed, and what’s left is an unpredictable power grid that often produces energy when it is not needed (waste energy) and thus costing Germans hundreds of millions annually. She also accuses the established politicians of ignoring citizens as they ruin Germany’s landscape with wind parks.

“Interestingly it is often Green party voters who we find themselves among wind park protesters. In their daily lives these people are recognizing that what is being sold as green electricity in fact has nothing to do with being green. They are rejecting the industrial turbines in forests."…

Weeser also dismisses claims by the Green Party that wind energy is “the most inexpensive” on the market, asking them directly: “If that is really true, then why do they need subsidies? Why are we paying 25 billion euros annually for their feed-in?”

From Dr. Rainer Kraft of AfD:

Kraft slams the government’s climate-protection approach of spending “15 euros to avoid 1 euro of damage” as a policy one would expect from “a fool.” Adding: “there just couldn’t be less scientific understanding than that.” Echoing Donald Trump’s ideas on international treaties, Kraft also sees them as being ruinous to German industry, and that the ultimate target of climate protection is to establish “an eco-socialist centrally-planned economy” and that climate protection is the “instrument” to bring it about. He then labeled the Greens’ energy policy as “eco-populist voodoo.”

Gosselin concludes:

[E]xpect the traditional established parties to continue seeing the unheard of erosion among their disenchanted voter bases. Never has postwar Germany seen a political shift on such a massive scale… Though 25% may not sound impressive, it is amazing when one considers that only a decade ago there was virtually universal parliamentary support for green energies. Those days are over. And now as the failure of the Energiewende becomes ever more glaring, reaching the political tipping point on the issue of the Energiewende is just a question of a few more years.

By the way, according to this post on Clean Energy Wire on January 5, Germany got the percent of its electricity from “renewables” all the way up to 36.1% in 2017, from about 32.3% in 2016. Oh, but its total CO2 emissions actually increased.

[T]he country’s total emissions stagnated for the third year in a row, because more oil and gas were used in transport, heating and industry…

Unfortunately, changing minds in Germany has required the people to act as guinea pigs for a decade or so in the grand experiment in “eco-populist voodoo.” The same method will work equally well in the U.S. Sadly, I appear to live in one of the places whose residents are among the designated guinea pigs.

During the latter stages of co-authoring a book honoring the Weather Channel Pioneers (coming soon), John Coleman sadly passed away January 20th at age 83 at his home in Las Vegas surrounded by friends and family. John Coleman retired in 2014 after nearly 61 years in weather broadcasting.

John learned to love weather and nature from his dad, a college professor who had been raised on a farm in Alpine, Texas. John never stopped learning, combining self and college classroom study, observation, and knowledge gained from all the people he worked with.

I had the profound privilege to work closely with him at Good Morning America and then at the cable TV Weather Channel. For GMA, John often worked all through the night, helping to put together a quality product for the viewers including a minute feature with the goals of informing and educating. He believed the more the viewers understood, the more capable they would be of utilizing the weather to their benefit.

The seeds of ‘The Weather Channel’ was a dream I first heard about in 1980 that became more and more real in the stillness of the night as while we worked together at Good Morning America in 1980 and 1981. I cherish the memory of long discussions and the promise of a mission that seemed, at times impossible. But John was driven to see his dream happen.

Some days he would board a plane after the shows to see a venture capitalist about funding his idea, returning in the evening, showering, changing clothes and heading back to work. His sleep was often a nap on the plane and maybe a half hour at his desk. Talk about dedication.

His dream of a national service with localized weather information was realized with The Weather Channel in 1982 when Frank Batten at Landmark and John came to an agreement on a cable weather service. John worked tirelessly on helping us others hire the right staff and detailing the product and programming.

Many of the Weather Channel Pioneers came to The Weather Channel because of John. He was a TV weather rock star. He inspired and coached them in those hard early days as we all were feeling our way in a business for which there was no blueprint or precedent. He wondered whether he was too hard at times on his staff, which he loved dearly. But he felt it was his obligation to make sure they knew what we had to do differently being everyone’s local weather source.

John and many of the original pioneers chronicle how the Weather Channel evolved in this upcoming book. Those founding members of The Weather Channel had a reunion in 2012 in Atlanta and we were so pleased John celebrated with us there.

So many of our Pioneers responded to his sudden death with expressions of great sadness and recognition of him as a visionary who changed TV weather forever (first day responses).

His family honored his wishes to have no services but to issue a eulogy on his life. Here is an excerpt:

Pioneer, scientist, and meteorologist are all words that were John Coleman. Husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, friend, mentor were the more important words that defined him.

Coleman’s first job in broadcasting was during his time as a high school student. He hosted a radio show on WCIL in Carbondale Illinois. In 1953, while he was a student at the University of Illinois he got his first TV job at WCIA in Champaign, Illinois doing the early evening weather forecast and hosting a local bandstand show called “At The Hop.” After receiving his degree in 1957, he became the weather anchor for WCIA’s sister station in Peoria, Illinois. Over his career, Coleman was meteorologist in Omaha and Milwaukee and then for 20 years he was the weather anchor for the ABC affiliate WLS-TV in Chicago.

During his time at WLS his pioneering in the broadcast world accelerated. He and his team at WLS developed a format that was coined “happy talk news” where the on-air personalities interacted with each other, a format used frequently today. In 1972, Coleman and his stage crew at WLS-TV created the first chroma key (green screen) weather map, a format used almost universally in TV weather forecasts today.

In 1975 Coleman became the original meteorologist when ABC launched its new morning show, Good Morning America. He stayed seven years with this top-rated program.

In the early 1980’s, John had a vision for 24-hour TV weather which he took from concept to reality in 1981 and which he named “The Weather Channel.” He served as its first CEO and President when The Weather Channel launched in 1982. It was during this time, he was honored by the AMS for “Outstanding Service by a Broadcast Meteorologist.”

After his time at The Weather Channel, Coleman returned to local TV in New York, Chicago, Palm Springs and then to KUSI in San Diego, where he was chief meteorologist for 20 happy years. John loved forecasting the “gorgeous” San Diego weather and it was the perfect end to an outstanding 61-year professional career.

During his time in San Diego and into his retirement, John was committed and passionate in his effort to educate the public about the false science behind claims of global warming. He spoke at conventions, narrated videos, wrote a popular blog, and never missed an opportunity to present the science debunking the climate change movement. His blog can be found at https://johncolemanblog.com/ . Coleman was also a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, one of the world’s leading free-market think tanks promoting solutions to social and economic problems.

John was an energetic and passionate man about all he loved, including cards, especially poker. He loved life and was a lifelong learner. He will be remembered as a kind, funny, intelligent man who loved his profession, science and his family and friends. His mantra to his family members came from one of his favorite artist’s songs, Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy, “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

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John I wish we could tell you again how much we appreciate what you did for all of us who joined you on your impossible dream ride.

As Winston Churchill said “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” John, you gave so much to give your dream life.

From the Man of La Mancha song “Impossible Dream” these excerpted lyrics apply.

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

Your heart should lie peaceful and calm. The world is a better place because you strove with your last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star.

In March the Heartland Institute fired a big broadside right into the teaching of climate change alarmism in America’s schools. They began sending Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming directly to many of the Nation’s science teachers. Of course the alarmists went nuts, especially Sen. Sheldon “jail the skeptics” Whitehouse, who denounced Heartland’s bold move in a series of letters to various education groups.

My group is now taking the next skeptical step. We are crowd funding the Climate Change Debate Education (CCDE) project. While Heartland’s effort explains skepticism to teachers, our goal is to explain it to the students. You can make donations here.

Our project will establish a website portal that collects and distributes materials to teach about the climate debate. Once established and given sufficient funding we will also produce new teaching materials. The long term goal is to build a collection that systematically addresses all of the important climate science issues at the appropriate grade levels. Our target audience is not just teachers, but parents, friends of students and the students themselves.

There are presently a lot of alarmist websites offering one-sided classroom materials teaching the false dogma of dangerous human induced climate change. That this alarmism is highly debatable is nowhere to be seen on these websites. So we want to counter these alarmist websites with one that teaches about the real debate, between alarmism and realistic skepticism.

Both the Federal government and many advocacy groups maintain websites that distribute alarmist climate teaching materials. These materials teach that dangerous human induced climate change is settled science, which is far from true.

For example, the CLEAN website is funded jointly by NOAA, NSF and DOE. CLEAN stands for Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network. In fact “climate literacy” is code for the false belief that humans are causing dangerous climate change. CLEAN says it has over 600 free, ready to use resources suitable for use in secondary and higher education classrooms. They also boast that they are the core of the “Teaching Climate” part of the federal Climate.gov website. This is Government bias targeting children.

All of CLEAN’s teaching materials are biased and based on this false premise. The reality is that dangerous human influence on climate is completely unproven and the subject of intense scientific debate. That only the scary side is being presented as settled science is a severe lack of balance.

Creating balance in climate science education

The first step toward creating balance in climate education is to provide teaching materials that properly present the scientific debate as it actually is. We propose a phased approach to this effort. First an implementation phase then, if funding is available, a production phase. Here the goal is to recruit and guide volunteers who will produce highly targeted teaching materials. In particular, there is a need for simple, yet well designed, lesson plans that teach a specific scientific issue to a specific grade level.

These lesson plans need to be tailored to the state standards, which typically dictate what topics are taught in which grades. There are numerous specific scientific issues that need to be taught at different grade levels. Each potential lesson needs to be simple and compact, designed to fit into the mandated curriculum. Moreover, each lesson must stand alone, because teaching time is limited.

Getting around the gatekeepers

We will also develop short, handout types of materials as a way to get around what we call the gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are doctrinaire people who make it hard to get balance into the classroom. It may be the principal, the teacher’s supervisor or even the teacher.

Our handouts will be something that a parent or student can bring to class. It is normal for students to bring supplementary materials to class, especially when the topic is controversial. In the case of climate change, surveys have also shown that parents often become involved. As with the lesson plans, these handouts will be highly focused, nonpolitical, and tailored to a specific grade level. Since they will be online they can easily be emailed as well. Thus the gatekeepers cannot prevent their distribution.

Target audiences

There are three distinct target audiences - teachers, parents and students. Teachers need lesson plans, which are relatively specialized documents. Students need materials written at their grade level. Parents need non-technical information that they can explain to their children or use to confront a gatekeeper. Of course teachers and non-parents can use this information as well. The website will be organized in such a way that each group can find what they need.

It is important to keep in mind that many K-12 science teachers do not have science degrees, nor do most parents. K-12 is not the place to go into the technical details of climate science. Simplicity is the key.

Climate alarmism dominated the Obama era and run-up to Paris. But it’s at least as bizarre, dogmatic and intolerant now that: President Trump pulled the United States out of the all pain/no gain Paris climate pact; the US EPA is reversing anti-fossil fuel programs rooted in doom-and-gloom climatology; America is producing and exporting more oil, gas and coal; developing nations are burning vastly more of these fuels; Poland is openly challenging EU climate diktats; and German, British Australian and other politicians are voicing increasing concerns about job-killing, eco-unfriendly “green” energy.

With trillions of dollars in research money, power, prestige, renewable energy subsidies, wealth redistribution schemes, and dreams of international governance on the line, the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex is not taking the situation lightly. Climate fear-mongering is in full swing. Tried-and-true scare stories still dominate the daily news, often with new wrinkles tied to current events.

The Winter Olympics were going to take “a huge hit from our warming planet,” the pressure group Protect Our Winters warned us (yes, it’s an actual organization). Of course, that was before fiendishly frigid conditions repeatedly postponed events and drove spectators from PyeongChang slopes.

But of course, bitter cold is “exactly what we should expect’ from the global warming “crisis,” said Climategeddon expert Al Gore, who got a C and D in the only two science courses he took in college. It’s reminiscent of dire predictions that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2010 (or 2015 or 2025), and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” (until record cold and snow battered the UK a couple years later).

We’re likewise propagandized constantly with deliberate falsehoods about “carbon pollution.” We burn carbon, in the form of hydrocarbons and coal. In the process, we emit carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant. It is the miracle plant food that makes life on Earth possible.

Other standard scares ignore the innumerable, monumental benefits of carbon-based fuels - and blame these fuels and CO2 emissions for planetary warming (and cooling), rising seas, forest fires, and every major problem from malaria to rainstorms, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes.

A newly discovered danger, say a couple researchers, endangers green sea turtles. Planetary warming is causing up to 99% of turtle eggs to hatch as females. It won’t be long, perhaps just decades, until “there will not be enough males: to propagate the species. Some “30 years of knowledge” support this thesis. That would take us all the way back to 1988, a decade before the 18-year global warming “hiatus” that was interrupted by the 2015-16 El Nino; a half-century since the Dust Bowl and record high planetary temperatures of the 1930s; 40 years after scientists were convinced Earth was about to enter a new little ice age; and some 750 years after the 300-year-long Medieval Warm Period. One has to wonder how sea turtles managed to survive such previous warm spells - and cold periods like the four-century-long Little Ice Age, since cold weather apparently churns out only male sea turtles.

Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton asserted that women “will bear the brunt of looking for food, looking for firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all the grass is finally gone, as the desertification moves south” because of climate change. Wrong. Entire families will continue to bear these burdens because of anti-energy policies imposed in the name of sustainability and climate change prevention.

(For more fearsome forecasts, see The Warmlist, a no longer complete, but still entertaining compendium of some 800 horrors supposedly caused by “dangerous manmade global warming and climate change.") The constant consternation strikes many as ridiculous. But others have become true believers - and have committed to not having children, not taking showers, de-carbonizing, de-industrializing and de-growing developed countries, shutting off oil pipelines, and other futile actions that bring no earthly benefits.

Our planet has certainly been warming. Thank goodness for that, because the extra warmth lifted habitats and humanity out of the Little Ice Age and its chilly, stormy weather, greatly reduced arable land, short growing seasons and CO2-starved crops. Powerful, uncontrollable natural forces drove that temperature rise. Earth may now face dangerous Mann-made global warming and climate cataclysms concocted by computer models - but no “unprecedented” or “existential” human-caused dangers in the real world.

Question or challenge climate crisis orthodoxy, however, and you will be vilified and face RICO prosecutions, bogus slander and SLAPP lawsuits, censure or expulsion from your university, attacks for sponsoring museum exhibits, or even “four hots and a cot” in a jail or a faraway gulag.

For a concise, yet comprehensive, and eminently readable lay guide to real climate science, geologist Gregory Wrightstone’s Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know may meet your needs. Its 123 pages are organized into two sections and 30 easily understood chapters, written in plain English and complimented by over 100 colorful charts, graphs, tables and illustrations, covering all the common climate issues, fears and myths. The book is capped off by a handy list of 60 inconvenient facts that eviscerate alarmist dogma, and15
pages of references. As Lord Christopher Monckton’s says in his foreword, Wrightstone has succeeded “splendidly” in reliably distinguishing myths from realities in the climate debate.

The opening section devotes 54 pages to explaining greenhouse and climate basics, showing how carbon dioxide is huge in planetary life but minuscule on the climate front, skewering the myth of a 400 ppm CO2 “tipping point,” analyzing climate models versus real world measurements of global temperature, and showing why and how water vapor plays such a vital and dominant role in weather and climate.

Carbon dioxide, he notes, is essential plant food that makes forests, grasslands and crops grow faster and better, with less water, and thus able to feed more people from less land. Figure I-15 summarizes data from 3,586 experiments on 549 plant species and depicts how crop yields would increase and generate trillions of dollars in overall monetary benefits, if CO2 levels rose by 300 ppm. His analysis of the “hockey stick,” computer models and temperature predictions is equally illuminating. Part II of Wrightstone’s book examines the many assertions and myths of a coming climate apocalypse, and demonstrates why they fail to meet basic standards of scientific evidence and integrity. The opening chapter demolishes the phony 97% “consensus” of scientists who supposedly agree that humans are now the primary cause of extreme weather and climate change, ushering in a catastrophic future. Subsequent chapters address famines, forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, melting ice packs, rising seas, polar bear populations, and other staples of climate alarmism.

“Ocean acidification,” he points out, is a term deliberately chosen to alarm people about an imaginary problem. Being honest, and saying seas might become very slightly less alkaline (have slightly lower pH levels) from more atmospheric and oceanic CO2 in the coming centuries, wouldn’t suffice. Worse, an oft cited study ignored a full century of readily available data, and instead used computer models to fill in the contrived “gaps” on pH levels. As Wrightstone suggests, many people would call it Climate pHraud.

The bottom line? Scientists still do not understand the complexities of climate and weather. They still cannot separate human influences from the effects of powerful natural forces that have brought often profound climate changes throughout history. There is no evidence of a coming climate cataclysm. Spending trillions of dollars - and condemning billions of people to expensive, insufficient, unreliable, land and raw material gobbling wind, solar and biofuel energy - is not just unnecessary. It is immoral.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

By Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times - Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Climate change has been blamed for causing higher temperatures, drought, wildfires and hurricanes - and now it’s being credited with generating record snow.

A study released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports found that snowfall on the highest peak in the Alaska Range has more than doubled since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, which researchers attribute to climate change.

How? The study linked the heavy snow accumulation to “warmer waters thousands of miles away in the tropical Pacific and Indian oceans,” driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Dartmouth College press release.

“We were shocked when we first saw how much snowfall has increased,” said Erich Osterberg, an assistant professor of earth sciences who led the investigation with researchers from Dartmouth, the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire.

“We had to check and double-check our results to make sure of the findings,” Mr. Osterberg said. “Dramatic increases in temperature and air pollution in modern times have been well established in science, but now we’re also seeing dramatic increases in regional precipitation with climate change.”

The paper, which analyzed “two ice cores collected at 13,000 feet from Mount Hunter in Denali National Park” demonstrated that the modern snowfall is “unprecedented for at least the past 1,200 years and far exceeds normal variability.”

Lead author Dominic Winski, a Dartmouth research assistant, said it was “now glaringly clear from our ice core record that modern snowfall rates in Alaska are much higher than natural rates before the Industrial Revolution.”

“This increase in precipitation is also apparent in weather station data from the past 50 years, but ice cores show the scale of the change well above natural conditions,” Mr. Winski said.

Less convinced were climate skeptics, who have long taken issue with the climate change movement for chalking up any number of weather patterns and natural disasters to global warming.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue, chief operations officer at Weather.us, made the point that Alaska presumably would have experienced significant natural variability during that time frame and beyond.

“Is the null hypothesis that climate remained static in Alaska since year 1600?” he said on Twitter. “The Pacific Ocean surely has variability on decadal/centennial/millennial time scales that would affect mountain snow.”

The “global warming causes heavy snow” thesis isn’t new. During a 2011 cold snap, former Vice President Al Gore said that “scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe” by sending more moisture into the air.

Others have claimed the opposite. In 2000, University of East Anglia senior research scientist David Viner concluded that winter snowfalls would become “a very rare and exciting event,” thanks to global warming.

Quipped Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, “Why not? Less snow used to ‘prove’ global warming. Snow used to be ‘a thing of the past’ according to climate activists. Now more snow ‘proves’ global warming. No matter the weather, they can claim it is consistent with global warming theory.”

The latest study, “Industrial-Age Doubling of Snow Accumulation in the Alaska Range Linked to Tropical Ocean Warming,” found that winter snowfall has risen by 117 percent in south-central Alaska and that summer snows increased by 49 percent in less than 200 years.

The paper cited scientific models predicting increases in global precipitation per degree of warming of as much as 2 percent but concluded that such an explanation still didn’t explain the heavy Denali snow.

“The research suggests that warming tropical oceans have caused a strengthening of the Aleutian Low pressure system with its northward flow of warm, moist air, driving most of the snowfall increases,” said the release. “Previous research has linked the warming tropical ocean temperatures to higher greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Mr. Osterberg said scientists continue to discover that “climate change is full of surprises.”

“We need to understand these changes better to help communities prepare for what will come with even more carbon dioxide pollution in the air,” he said.

A new study conducted by the independent grid operator in New England includes a stark warning for utilities, politicians and customers. While the United States has already become the world’s leading energy producer, ISO New England’s research shows that the region may have to rely on increasing amounts of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet its future power needs, even though it sits on the doorstep of one of the world’s largest natural gas fields.

The research is consistent with the region’s lack of natural gas infrastructure that was highlighted in our own report ‘What if Pipelines Aren’t Built into the Northeast’ released last year. This shortage means that the region could face a regular risk of rolling winter blackouts by 2024 and would have to rely on more expensive fuel and overseas LNG to meet peak demand.

Worse, the problem is so severe that emergency measures will likely be necessary almost every winter by the mid-2020s, with the grid operator estimating that rolling blackouts would be necessary in 19 out of the 23 scenarios they studied.

ISO New England’s study concluded with a blunt assessment of the problem: “while the use of natural gas for both heating and power generation is growing, the natural gas supply infrastructure is not expanding at the same pace, resulting in natural gas supply constraints in winter. Given the region’s current and growing reliance on natural gas, limitations on the region’s natural gas delivery infrastructure are the most significant component of New England’s fuel-security risk.”

None of this should come as a surprise to those who have been following the energy debate in New England over the past few years. The region has seen closures of many of its coal and nuclear plants, making it increasingly dependent on natural gas generation. A lack of infrastructure has already led to residential electricity prices that are 44 percent higher than the U.S. average, and 62 percent higher for industrial users. New Englanders are also paying 29 percent more, on average, for natural gas.

The impact of those high prices is significant. Our report found that if additional pipeline infrastructure isn’t built, it will cost New England more than 78,000 jobs and $7.6 billion in regional GDP by 2020.

Of course, the irony is that neighboring states like Ohio and Pennsylvania sit above the Marcellus and Utica Shales, two of the world’s richest gas reserves. Unfortunately, an aggressive and well-funded campaign by extreme activists has fought against and prevented new pipeline projects that proposed to deliver this energy resource to New England markets.

Projects like the Northeast Energy Direct, Access Northeast and Constitution pipelines could bring abundant and affordable Pennsylvania gas to New England, but activists have successfully lobbied regulators to deny key permits necessary for pipeline construction.

These misguided efforts have actually worked against regional environmental goals. While renewable sources of energy show great promise, they also require backup sources that must be quickly scaled up to meet peak demand and pick up the slack when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. People still need fuel to heat their homes and power their businesses, schools, and hospitals.

But because of a lack of infrastructure, rather than using cheaper and cleaner domestic fuel from neighboring states, New Englanders are forced to pay more to burn fuel oil and import higher-priced natural gas from overseas to meet their energy needs. Neither of these scenarios makes economic or environmental sense.

New England needs modern infrastructure to compete. Energy infrastructure is no exception. We applaud the current administration’s focus on revamping our nation’s infrastructure, and hope New England is included. It’s time for state and local lawmakers to face reality and put consumers over extreme special interests to ensure affordable, reliable energy for all of their residents.

Karen Harbert is the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.

A climate scientist infamous for incorrectly claiming he once won the Nobel Prize is criticizing a museum for not being faithful to the truth and facts because of its association with a billionaire climate skeptic.

A so-called climate denier does not deserve a leadership position at the American Museum of Natural History, according to Penn State University professor Michael Mann. He was referring to Rebekah Mercer, a wealthy conservative who sits on the museum’s board of trustees.

‘A natural-history museum must be accurate, faithful to the facts and trusted by the public,” Mann wrote Monday in an editorial for The News York Times. He urged the museum to distance itself from Mercer, a supporter of President Donald Trump and donator to conservative causes.

Mann has consistently been called out for falsely claiming to have co-won the Nobel Prize in 2007 with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President Al Gore.

The prize was awarded to Gore that year for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change,” according to the panel.

Mann claimed in his lawsuit in 2012 against conservative pundit Mark Steyn and National Review that he was a Nobel Laureate, but the Nobel committee has consistently rebuked this claim. Mann went on to slam the museum and Mercer for not adhering to the truth and scientific standards.

“For years, many scientists were hesitant to come out of their labs and speak up for fear that truth-telling would result in personal attacks or threaten their professional credibility,” said Mann, who gained fame for his “hockey stick” graph showing global temperature rise - Gore eventually used the academic’s graphs in his documentary, “Inconvenient Truth.”

Mann and a handful of scientists used a super PAC to get their colleagues to align against Trump during the presidential election over the president’s willingness to “embrace of conspiracy theories, anti-science attitudes, and disregard for experts.”

The group, Not Who We Are PAC, wasn’t heavily involved during the election, compared to the tens of millions spent by other super PACs. The group has only spent $23,000 on ads targeting Trump, according to federal filings.
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Mann dismissed the idea that the push against Mercer is a politically partisan issue. He later suggested the museum move to use the Mercer family’s donations “to develop exhibitions and programs that educate the pubic about the climate-denial machine that illuminate its history of using propaganda to obstruct pro-climate action and the document how we’ve arrived at this current crisis point for the planet.”

Germany—that’s the place where there really is a 100% consensus on the need for immediate action to solve the supposed “climate crisis.” It’s the land of the “Energiewende”—the forced transition to the use of intermittent renewables like wind and solar to generate electricity. It’s the place where—as I noted in this post back in September -- no major political party has dissented on the need to act on the “climate” issue. It’s the place that has happily driven its usage of renewables to generate electricity up to about 30% of the supply, and therefore its cost of residential electricity up to more than triple the average U.S. price. It’s a place where anyone questioning the so-called “science” underlying the warming scare can expect to be greeted with derision and scorn. And yet, somehow reality still seems to be intruding.

Over the weekend, the talks among political parties in Germany to form a coalition government collapsed. As of now, nobody seems to know what is going to happen next. And—even though there is little overt dissent on the virtue of reducing carbon emissions—it seems like the ever-more-evident costs of this “climate” program are starting to drive events.

Just to set the table, let me remind readers about the state of the political playing field on this issue in Germany and the rest of Europe and other major countries. A good background article is this one from Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian from October 2015, “The Republican Party Stands Alone in Climate Denial.” The article summarizes some work from Norwegian political scientist Sondre Batstrand, analyzing the positions on this issue of all conservative political parties from countries including the USA, UK, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany. The conclusion:

[Batstrand] found that the US Republican Party stands alone in its rejection of the need to tackle climate change and efforts to become the party of climate supervillains.

That’s not the only example of over-the-top rhetoric in the piece. For example, Nuccitelli quotes Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine on the position of then-candidate Jeb Bush on this issue:

In any other democracy in the world, a Jeb Bush would be an isolated loon, operating outside the major parties, perhaps carrying on at conferences with fellow cranks, but having no prospects of seeing his vision carried out in government.

In Germany, a political party needs to get 5% of the vote in an election to get any seats in the Bundestag. As an indication of how correct Batstrand was, in the previous (2013) election, the only party that could remotely be considered a climate dissenter, AfD, got only 4.7% and no seats. Another party, FDP—a free market classic liberal party and not really climate dissenters, but legitimately concerned about the costs of “climate” policies—got 4.8% and also no seats.

In the recent elections in September, those two parties suddenly got, between them, 23.3% of the vote and 24.6% of the seats. And suddenly Angela Merkel needs one or both of them to form a coalition government. Oh, and she also needs the Green Party. How is that playing out? An impasse! Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation reports this morning:

Most remarkable: Germany’s failed and increasingly unpopular climate policies are at the core of the crisis. It also signals the collapse of Germany’s decade-old climate consensus. While the Green Party demanded the immediate shut-down of 10-20 of Germany’s 180 coal power plants, the Liberal Party (FDP) stood by its manifesto promise of a radical reform of the Energiewende, advocating the end to subsidies for renewable energy.

Experts at the Federal Ministry of Economics had warned participants at the exploratory coalition talks that Germany will miss its legally binding 2020 climate targets by a mile and that trying to achieve its 2030 goals would risk the economic prosperity of the country. The Ministry also warned that any attempt to force a radical reduction of CO2 emissions :by 2020 would only be possible by partial de-industrialisation of Germany.”

Climate business as usual is no longer an option for the Liberals [aka FDP]. The party fears that a fast exit from coal-fired power generation, as demanded by the Greens, would result in severe social, economic and political problems. A continuation of radical climate policies would affect Germany’s main coal regions, not least in Eastern Germany where the right-wing protest party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) had gained significant support in the federal elections in September.

So, if you were to go around the streets of the major cities of Germany and take an opinion survey, you will find very close to one hundred percent agreement on the need to ‘take action’ on climate change immediately. But what? Does this mean that we will be putting thousands of coal miners out of a job, and more thousands of utility workers at coal plants out of a job, and driving the cost of electricity from three times the U.S. average to five times or maybe ten, and making our electric grid not work right any more, and by the way also “partially de-industrializing” Germany? Wait, you didn’t tell us about those things!

I’m actually hoping that Chancellor Merkel does a deal with the Greens and maybe the S
DP, and continues down her road of green folly. The real world needs some concrete examples of actual disaster to teach us a lesson in reality.

During December 2017, Germany’s millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow. Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.

The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.

Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas: engineering excellence and green totalitarianism. Angela Merkel’s support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

But King Winter has exposed the weak underbelly of Germany’s energy policy. Empress Merkel now faces a hostile political climate with no clothes.

The green energy retreat has started in the green energy movement’s own heartland.

During December 2017, Germany’s millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow. Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.

The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.

Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas: engineering excellence and green totalitarianism. Angela Merkel’s support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

But King Winter has exposed the weak underbelly of Germany’s energy policy. Empress Merkel now faces a hostile political climate with no clothes.

The green energy retreat has started in the green energy movement’s own heartland.

Trump gives hope to derailment of the establishment’s plans (both parties) for a New World Order - which would cede our rights and control over our lives including a redistribution of any wealth to the UN.

Update: see the whole story behind the story in their own words in Global Warming Quotes & Climate Change Quotes: Human-Caused Global Warming Advocates/Supporters by C3 Headlines.

Quotes by H.L. Mencken, famous columnist: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” And, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.”

We start with Mencken’s quotes because they are so well known from the past, but yet still so relevant so many years later. His past insights to those whose lives are addicted to the seeking of power, or control, or fame, or money is still as valid today, as it was 70 years ago. Below are quotes from the powerful; the rich; the religious; the studious; the famous; the fanatics; and, the aspiring, all sharing a common theme of keeping “the populace alarmed” to further their own personal, selfish goals.

The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose their values and desires on others. The people below represent such a group, and they are not saints as individuals; in fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately.

Once you read the below quotes, come back and re-read the previous paragraph. The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose an ‘Agenda’ based on their elite values and self-importance. The people below represent such a group, and they are not saints as individuals; in fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately.

The Australian prime minister’s chief business adviser has accused the United Nations of using debunked climate change science to lead a new world order - provocative claims made to coincide with a visit from the top UN climate negotiator.

Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN framework convention on climate change, touring Australia this week, urged the country to move away from heavily polluting coal production.

Under Tony Abbott’s leadership, Australia has been reluctant to engage in global climate change politics, unsuccessfully attempting to keep the issue off the agenda of the G20 leaders’ summit in Brisbane last year.

Maurice Newman, the chairman of Abbott’s business advisory council and a climate change sceptic with a history of making provocative statements, said the UN was using false models showing sustained temperature increases to end democracy and impose authoritarian rule.

“The real agenda is concentrated political authority,” Newman wrote in an opinion piece published in the Australian newspaper. “Global warming is the hook. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN....

“It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.”

Figueres used an address in Melbourne to urge Australia to move away from coal, the country’s second-largest export, as the world grapples with global warming.

“Economic diversification will be a challenge that Australia faces,” she said.

Abbott has described coal as “good for humanity” and the “foundation of prosperity” for the foreseeable future.

Figueres also urged Australia to play a leading role at the climate summit in Paris in December, a call unlikely to be heeded given Abbott’s track record.

At the Brisbane G20 meeting, he warned that the Paris summit would fail if world leaders decided to put cutting carbon emissions ahead of economic growth.

At home, Abbott, who in 2009 said the science behind climate change was “crap”, repealed a tax on carbon pricing and abolished the independent Climate Commission advisory body.

Asked on the Canberra leg of her trip if the politics around renewable energy was as toxic elsewhere in the world, Figueres said: “No. At the global level what we see is increased participation of renewables, increased investment in renewables, increased excitement about renewables.”

Abbott’s office and the UN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As an honours engineering graduate from the University of Queensland I am inquiring of you as to the reasons our university supports the work of John Cook who serially misrepresents climate and science? Specifically, why is our university wasting valuable funds to mislead the public through a free course and by producing associated international video material? Course

It details John Cook’s fabrication of an unscientific ‘consensus’. Science is not decided by claims of consensus. Resorting to claims of consensus is unscientific and contradicts the scientific process.

Fabricating false claims of scientific consensus is not honest.

Science is decided by empirical scientific evidence. John Cook has repeatedly failed to provide any such evidence that use of hydrocarbon fuels is causing the entirely natural climate variability we experience.

A succinct summary of John Cook’s fabrication of a consensus, and of the corruption of science upon which his claims rely and that is furthered by his claims, and of the empirical scientific evidence he blatantly contradicts, are discussed in pages 6-18 of my report to federal MPs Senator Simon Birmingham and Bob Baldwin. It is available at this link.

My seven years of independent investigation have proven that there is no such empirical scientific evidence anywhere in the world. Climate alarm is unfounded and is a purely political construct pushing a political agenda. Please refer to Appendices 2, 6, 6a, 7 and 8 at this link.

John Cook’s core public climate claims are false and blatantly contradict empirical scientific evidence. Please refer to appendix 4 at the same link.

Further, John Cook and / or his employer are receiving funds in return for his deceiving the public, politicians and journalists and I’m wondering if that would make his work a serious offense.

As you likely know, John Cook works closely with the university’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg who reportedly has many serious conflicts of financial interest surrounding his false climate claims. These are discussed on pages 54-59 of Appendix 9 at this link and briefly on pages 16 and 17 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin MP.

I draw your attention to my formal complain dated Wednesday 10 November 2010 to the university senate about the work of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg misrepresenting climate and science. That was not independently investigated by then Vice Chancellor Paul Greenberg who was subsequently dismissed over another event, reportedly for a breach of ethics. My formal complaint is discussed on pages 57 and 58 of Appendix 9 at this link.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg’s responses to my request for empirical scientific evidence of human causation of climate variability have repeatedly and always failed to provide such evidence.

This email is openly copied to both Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook and to reputable Australian scientists and academics expert on climate and to Viv Forbes an honours graduate in geology from our university. Viv Forbes understands the key facts on climate and on the corruption of climate science by beneficiaries of unfounded climate alarm perpetrated falsely by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook.

Please stop John Cook’s misrepresentations and restore scientific integrity to our university. I please request a meeting with you to discuss our university’s role in deceiving the public and to discuss restoring scientific integrity. I would be pleased for that meeting to be in the company of John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg if that suits you.

Pages 19-26 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin discuss the serious damage to our nation and to humanity and our natural environment worldwide as a result of unfounded climate alarm spread by our university’s staff. I hope that you will fulfill your responsibility for investigating and ending such corruption. To neglect to do so will mean that you condone such damage and dishonesty. I seek confidence that you will restore the university’s scientific integrity and look forward to your reply.

The 97% “consensus” study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook’s study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,

“The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.”

Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)

Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science

In response to multiple inquiries from media and global warming advocates, Friends of Science issue this release to expose the statistical manipulation evident from the break down of the Cook et al paper. Friends of Science decry the linking of this flawed study with alleged danger from man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as there has been no global warming in 16 years despite a rise in CO2 levels; Friends of Science say the sun and oceanic oscillations are the main drivers of climate change, not CO2.

The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook’s (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% “consensus” study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook’s study is an embarrassment to science. See the list here.

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See the Galileo Movement here.Visit Then click on the blue text: “9.2.12 Evidence of Political Fraud - Malcolm Roberts”

PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.

SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.

DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.

CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce ‘panic for profit.’

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for “DATA” by “DENIERS.’ Also skilled at affecting an aura of “Smartest Person in the Room” to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.

JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge

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Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.

NOTE:

See all the talks at the latest ICCC9 Conference in Las Vegas in 2014 here.

Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV. If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.

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See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.

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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.

The left loves to reference desmogblog.com when any skeptic produce an analysis or paper challenging CAGW - see the real story about this looney left green PR firm here.

“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”

The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.

The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.

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See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)